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How to create a successful chatbot

Communication with robots became a random thing for people from the 21st century. For instance, virtual assistants Siri, Alexa, Google now, Cortana, also shopping online – you receive help from virtual assistants – a big amount of them are chatbots, not real people.

From the point of view of the online shop owner – it is much easier to create a chatbot that would answer to all the customers’ questions and, only in case of a need, will transfer queries to the next level of support. Chatbot doesn’t need a sick leave, breaks, may learn and act in the way you want it to act, and available 24/7.

In this article, we will review what should be taken into account during the creation of the successful chatbot.

Define goals and expectations

First of all, determine a scope of activities, which should be performed by the chatbot. Set up goals, whether it should be a simple program that will provide answers to the question and suggest actions, take part in the advertising or be able to track progress in other services (f.e. the best price rate in Uber).

Understand your customer

One of the most important things for every kind of business is to know the customer. Understand who are your customers, what is the age group, level of education, country of residence, etc. It will help you to understand which kind of questions will they ask.

Design a conversation

After the activities described above are done, you may start the next step – design the conversation. Here are a few important issues that should be taken into account during designing of the conversation:

start with a small and simple bot;

don’t let chatbot pretend to be a real person;

watch the conversation and keep improving;

evaluate and optimize regularly;

keep communication clear and concise;

do not use jargon, remember – the chatbot represents your brand;

create a natural communication flow;

design an effective greetings message;

give your chatbot a unique day;

figure out which data you want to gather.

Define the framework

Chatfuel – A platform that allows building a chatbot for Messenger without coding. Messenger chats using forms, and allows users to request information and reply to the chatbot using buttons;

Botsify – Firstly, you need to choose, drag and drop the template and start the chatbot establishment. It integrates with different plugins, capable of machine learning and analytics integration;

Flow XO – More than 100 integrations are supported by the platform. Flow XO is easy in usage and has a big number of templates for a quick start;

Bottr – Provides option to embed bot to a specific website;

Motion.ai – Creates the diagram of the conversation flow, give you a possibility to analyze the behavior of your bot;

QnA maker – The system created by Microsoft. Using information from the FAQ page of your website, chatbot will be created within a couple of minutes;

Recast.ai – With this system you will be able to train, build and run the bot;

ChatterOn.io – Platform builds the bot flow and sets up the AI by entering a few examples of the expected conversation;

Octane.ai – System with the pre-built features makes easier to add content, messages, discussions, and filling out forms;

Looking ahead

Surely, the chatbot will not be created for 1 day/month/year usage. Creating a chatbot you should look ahead and adjust the bot up to new technologies. Below are a few important tips that will help you to create a long and happy life for the chatbot:

Teach the chatbot to learn. The world is developing rapidly and teaching chatbot to learn is ought to improve provided services. Also, the chatbot may let you know how it should be improved. Be careful here, as bot should not use slang or use inappropriate language while talking with customers.

Ability to predict the right option. Think about cases when bot doesn’t understand questions of the user, and the user does not provide an expected response. Repeatedly asking users to rephrase the query will annoy the customer, and stimulate him/her to move to your competitors.

Stay up-to-date with competitors. Living in the world of open competition means that everyone who runs a business should stay up-to-date with competitors.

learn things which your competitors’ succeed in;

analyze problematic issues of the competitors’ chatbot and avoid doing the same mistakes;

launch innovative features and improve the customer experience.

Summing up

We have reviewed the most important issues that should be taken into account during creation the chatbot. There is a wide range of platforms for the production of the bot, and adjusting it to your needs. Crucial is to understand the goals of the chatbot and implement it.